'Being Flynn' review: De Niro, revived, sparks father-son drama

The pedigree of “Being Flynn” is sufficiently schizoid to give you no real impression of what to expect.

Writer-director Paul Weitz has made “About a Boy” and “In Good Company” but also “Little Fockers” and “American Dreamz.” His chief star, Robert De Niro, has been taking payday jobs for years, diluting his reputation and legacy as a great actor. His other lead, Paul Dano, has never carried a whole film. And the distributors were frightened enough by the very name of the memoir on which the film is based, Nick Flynn’s “Another (BS) Night in Suck City,” to neuter it.

It could have been disastrous, truly. But instead “Being Flynn” is a smart, sweet, pained, and heartfelt film about promise and ruin and hope and despair and human failings and the blessings of connection and creativity.

Weitz finds a delicate poise between his cast (which includes Julianne Moore, Olivia Thirlby Wes Studi, and Lili Taylor) and non-actors playing the roles of homeless men and women. He makes deft use of not one but two voice-overs by characters who are supposed to be possessed of literary talent. And, most of all, he handles a potentially lurid blend of family melodrama and social realism with grace, tact and restraint.

Dano is Nick Flynn, adrift in romance and work and lost in his quest to be a writer, a career ambition inherited from his long-absent father, Jonathan (De Niro). The elder Flynn, a con man and misanthrope who loudly declares his writerly genius despite never having published anything, drives a taxi for a living until drink and irresponsibility cost him that security. He falls into homelessness at the very time that Nick has taken work at a homeless shelter. For a time, the two share the shelter uneasily, Jonathan becoming mentally instable and Nick falling into addiction. Something has to give.

Dano has an unformed quality that suits his character; you believe that the buffets of life, major or minor, could either wreck or remake him. And Moore is poignant in a smallish role. But the revelation, truly, is De Niro. It’s been ages since he’s dived fully and credibly into a dramatic character and lived inside its skin as he used to do routinely. He’s appeared in so much makework lately that you could reasonably fear that his creative instruments had rusted or vanished entirely. But his Jonathan Flynn is full-blooded and alive and perked with wit and anger and dark humor and madness. For that miracle alone, “Being Flynn” is worth a visit.